Critique: Sexual Objectification Good; Sexual Repression
Bad.
… so when you go home to-night and give a job to your
partner or masturbate, what ever floats your boat, (and I hope that it is at
least one of the two, unless you have a good and personal reason for
asceticism), re-call what George Carlin said: Have you ever wondered why they
call it a “job”? It makes it sound important. Makes you feel like you did some
thing use full for society.
Remember that this is not entirely a joke. You are not
merely releasing a thousand* or so unborn humans from repression; you are
releasing all of human-kind from Oppression.
I decided to begin this Critique at the end, because fuck
the structuralists. Seriously. They need it.
I decided out of curiosity to do a search on the word
“images” on the Google Image Search. This was of course accidental; I have
little time for idle games. I merely in-put “images” in the Google Search
server, hoping to be brought to the Images Engine by virtue of one of the
Results, and when that did not work I simply clicked the “Images” tab. But the
word “images” was still the query, and the results were GENUINELY fascinating.
The prospect of Compassion and Humility was on my mind at
the moment. Having debated competitively for a year on the College level I was
beginning to wonder why I had forgotten these two virtues. By “wonder” I do not
mean to say that I was surprised; Debaters tend to be at times the least
compassionate and the least humble of people. I only wondered why I would lend
so much authority to their conformity, complying with a proto-Fascist narrative
all for a false sense of security, to the point that it totally eclipsed the
Sun of Compassion and the Moon of Humility.
But here it was like walking into a genuine Zen temple. I
saw the most majestic tiger, the most heart-tugglingly awe-inspiring orangutan
(which was peculiarly labeled “panda”; the url simply said “panda.org”) a small
legion of adorable puppies, a vision of grandeur as hot-air balloons drifting
into the sun-set (funny how a still shot evokes so much motion to the mind. It
makes one think of Proust.). I saw a young girl holding sub flowers in her
hands, smiling innocently. I saw mountains which may very well have been the
object of her consciousness jutting out of a horizon like golden shark-teeth,
diving a sky that flowed into a reflective lake in two. I saw a penguin (I
think a macaroni-flavoured one; one of those distant relatives of the auk
surely) about to be devoured by a snake-tike aquatic mammal (weird, huh?). And
though my heart might have felt a trepidation of dis-ease at the sight of this,
simply by virtue of the pathetic fallacy (as Camus said we tend to want to
stamp the world with the human seal (seal in the sense of a rubber stamp, not
the aquatic friend [if that is not too pathetic and sentimental a fallacy in
its self]), and we are too sheltered from the “mutual eating society” that
Watts described Nature as) I was put at ease when I gazed upon the first of the
images: That of a tree standing solitarily in the midst of a tremendous field,
under a sky en-shrouded in clouds, but not concealed by them so much as adorned
as though they were fossil casts (the convex corollary of whom imprints are
concave) or bumps in Greek plaster or rust in Roman bronze.
And of course the moment would not have been complete were
it not for the glorious image of a woman. I thought: Yes. Behold the goddess:
The archetype of life. I speak by exaggeration of course, because it was her
sheer humanity, and the fortitude with which she asserted it, that completed by
vision of the Human Being within the field of immanence. Her perfect blonde
hair evoked the integrity of the fields, an analogy that a less utilitarian and
environmentally destructive race of people would have gladly made with no more
hesitation than the eye does. Her lips, firm and apprehensive but not shaken,
were open with a kind of receptivity with in her eyes, a gentle firmness that
balanced so eloquently the trust that all natural phenomena are heir to but the
more masculine warning: Do not violate this trust. Her God-given (or might one
say Nature-given?) frame was adorned in white spots like the cosmos their selves,
wrapping about the deeply humane curves of her breasts, knees, and shoulders as
though about some black hole, held together by a fabric that to the unwitting
eye would seem invisible, and to the more discerning eye looked like a kind of
soft chain-mail of miniscule links, holding the entire body together like the
fabric of the Universe (because of course one would not think except in a state
of total perversion to segregate those clothes from the body, as though to
un-dress and to violate her aforementioned sacred trust; as shall be explained
it this kind of “undressing” of the beautiful immance of truth, this violent
tendency to “expose the naked ugliness” of a situation by reducing it to the
merely human, that is the chief perversion of the cultural Marxists and other
self-proclaimed ‘feminists’ that I shall be criticising.). What complete the
image to my immense delight especially as a man were her boots. For a man, the
archetype of the damsel in distress is peculiarly moving, occurring in every
civilization in the course of human history, because I should never want a
woman to suffer unfairly. The instinct of man is to protect woman, and as my
dear friend Isaiah Valentine said: ‘The best way to defend your friends is to
teach them to defend their selves.” The stilettos time and time again have been
for me a symbol of female authority. If I ever criticised them the only
argument I could come up with was the feebly Utilitarian one: Why do women wear
heals? They must be so uncomfortable and damaging to the legs. The response
that shut me up in that matter: they make me FEEL POWER FULL.
I knew beholding this image that THIS was human sex. Not
animal sex, but akin to it in a way that the human mind, with its delicate but
unshaking balance of civility and passion, could stomach (or crotch?). It would
never have occurred to my mind that this was a “social construct”. Have you
noticed that people who claim sexuality to be “socially constructed” forget to
specify “human sexuality”? It is because they are humanists; they do not give a
flying fuck (literally) about the greater World. In this woman I beheld the
human animal: Not “all-too-human”, but retaining the dignity of Animality that
Humanism took from us, occurring with in the grandeur of the Universe in a distinctly
human way that is a gift to man. And by man I mean both the generic, asexual
word for “human”, (in fact that and “he” are the only asexual ways of referring
to the anonymous human in our language) as well as the sexual, erotic version
that means “male”, because to feel entitled is not a sin except in the
Judeo-Christian ethic.
Behold the dignity of the second chakra in the spectrum of
Existence. In other words.
Imagine my descent into frustration as I read the perception
made in the caption. The Absurd can truly strike one, as Camus said, at every
corner:
“This image is very sexualized. The clothing she is wearing
is designed to show her body shape and it is fairly revealing. The high heels
she is wearing are also associated with sexiness, and she is in a vulnerable
body pose. Her direct look at the camera, her red lipstick, and long hair also
contribute to sexualization.”
I’ll bet that “Sarah Murnen”, the author of that quote, does
not get laid a lot. I am too apathetic to look her up. If she does she must be
competitive. If she does not, as I suspect, she must be jealous.
Too soon? Then keep listening. Surely it is my
responsibility to all ways protect women like this model from humiliation. It
must be difficult to be young, female, and beautiful, right? The feminists at
least got that right, I think.
Sarah Murnen, her critic, probably lost some of the young
zeal, if she ever had it, over the years of working towards her PhD. Do I care?
No. Should I care? No. I have had enough of my own issues with PhD’s in order
that I might never again care except where such a title adds spice to a
personality that all ready commands respect with no need to demand it.
There is of course a dynamic betwixt the academic and the
artist. I have my self intuited it, playing with the idea of writing a script
where in a philosophy professor meets his doppelganger, an edgy punk-rocker. Of
course the aim of integration is to have both; it is only when we regard our
selves as victims of a social narrative, rendering our selves guilty of our own
victimhood by betraying the cause in cowardice, that we forget that we can do
both: Be respected AND visceral.
So what to make of Sarah’s commentary? Well clearly it is
far from mine. So why the slander? Why should I care how indecorously she
adorns this all ready well-adorned slut (I look fore ward to the day that this
word, surely in the back of Dr. Murnen’s mind, can not be used against women
because the cultural Marxists will begin to wear it as a badge of respect)? Why
put legs on a snake? Her legs are fine enough. She should be proud.
Sarah is engaged in no thing short of bullying. Alan Watts
says that it is a particularly domineering sort of personality – the kind that
wishes to “rule the world”, and badly – that must de-Romanticise every thing,
forgetting our kinship to Nature, condemning Human Nature, and establishing an
attitude of hostility towards the environment, whether its victims be kids
holding sunflowers, lions, puppies, trees, or damn fine-looking women.
Of course that a Will to Power is at work in Murnen’s
description is ubiquitous. It is no thing short of the Resentiment of a
school-girl for a more attractive class-mate. That this happens is a serious
problem, and every one who does this must be held responsible I think. Not in a
Fascistic way, but as a matter of general principle. We hear enough of violence
from men to women. But the most cruel violence must occur with IN a gender;
after all, as the Jungians pointed out: the Shadow is all ways the SAME GENDER
as the dreamer.
If the feminists want respect they have to earn it; they
cannot dis-possess their selves of the violence they do to their own kind, the
kind they have sworn to protect. And if you want to be an Equalist, well: Dr
Murner is far from that. Her entire attack is childish and of course
matronising. The worst kind of totalitarian cruelty, as pointed out by Slavoj
Zizek, is done by the Politically Correct crowd, because they do it IMPLICITLY.
This is the Bad Conscience idea from Nietzsche and the reason that Foucault
criticised the “civilisation” of the penal system. What is worse? To be
punished by public torture? Or to be “re-formed”? Do we pass judgement upon a
person soul or her actions? Clearly one can judge when the soul is PROJECTED
upon others, but that is the only excuse I can muster. Much like Alex in A
Clockwork Orange, the model in the photo-graph (whose name is peculiarly and
contrary to humane politeness omitted) is a victim of a system that wants her
to re-form. Except that she refuses to be. Her victimhood is not actual; it is
potential. Yet there is an aspect of it that is most cruel because it rests
OUTSIDE OF HER CONTROL. And that is the affect that Murner’s words have upon an
audience that the model shall never see. By portraying her as victim, simply a
projection of Dr Murner’s fantasies of vengeance, she RENDERS this woman (or at
least her image) a victim, and to the degree that we confuse the doctor’s
projections with Truth, so that we might with equally stupidity confuse images
with physical reality, this model will BE a victim.
So let’s look at her words care fully and closely…
“This image is very sexualized.”
The American spelling gives it away. This is totally
Utilitarian. It is all so phallogocentric.
There is a reason that it is called the “passive tone”. When
you use it it makes the object look passive. Passive in its roots means “pain”.
Why does the writer insist upon hurting her object? To make her look weak.
WHO is sexualizing her? A man? Not necessarily. A female?
CLEARLY not; how could a woman possibly have success in the artistic business?
But SURELY the model her self can not be held ACCOUNTABLE for her own
appearance. It is not as though it were her JOB to look good.
If the job of the Artist is, in theory, to produce Beauty,
why insult the Model? Artists are a minority class. There were even books
written on The Creative Class. Seriously. Look it up. Are the Sociologists
going to make their project the systematic marginalization of Artists?
As with all phallogocentric rhetoric there is a subtle
patriarchal tendency. Ascribed to the condition of the “victim” is the
invisible hand of the patriarch. But whose hand is it really? Well it CLEARLY
was not a man. That was not specified, so why presume? It CLEARLY was not a
female designer. It CLEARLY was not the object of consciousness. She has no
dignity; she is a mere object.
So whose hand is it? Doctor Murnen’s. The phallogocentric
all ways projects one’s OWN perversions.
“The clothing she is wearing is designed to show off her
body shape and it is fairly revealing.”
The perversion was all ready covered. Pun intended. Only a
pervert would forget that the clothes are their selves a part of the body in
the work of art: NOT some thing to be “seen through” and thus condemned. As for
“showing off”: Well. I uncovered this all ready: It is not only the dignity of
the female body, but that of the Universe its self and the feminine at work in
the Universe, which structuralists all ways condemn out of a perverse and
patriarchal religious ethic.
As for the Design:
That’s cute, Murnen. Really. Did YOU design those clothes?
Did YOU work in the factories that made it possible? Have you noticed? In
general it was ubiquitous in patriarchal societies that the Artisans and
Labourers were lower on the totem pole than the preachers and tyrants.
“The high heels she is wearing are also associated with
sexiness, and she is in a vulnerable body pose.”
Ya-da. Ya-da. You know: Some times people feel COMFORTABLE
resting every once in a while. Marie-Louise von Franz criticised this
civilization for being mal-adjusted to the female body. May be the girl just
needs to relax: Excellent. For you to label her “vulnerable” sounds perverse
and… “rapy”? Per chance by your own definitions: Yes.
All though I am thank full that you “associate” her “with
sexiness”, why not just come out and say it? She is sexy. If You did not notice
it you would not have known it; why trust what your male co-workers think? Or
are all of your staff lesbian?
Claiming “association” is Orwellian; Orwell de-liberately
warned against excessive words and idiomatic phrases. He was genius in
comprehending propaganda; his only regret was that he was not more attractive
to women. Per chance that was why he posited that totalitarian dictators would
use sexual repression as a form of control. Or may be he was just right, and I
have to get my head out of the Freudian gutter.
“Association” dis-possesses the WRITER of her own
responsibility as Subject, rendering subjectivity in the semblance of an
illusory objectivity. It again appeals the invisible hand of some one else that
we never see. Get your hands off of her, bitch. And yes I shall call you bitch.
Bitch does not merely describe the relationship of Power betwixt a man and a woman.
We have forgotten that women deserve this distinction when they are oppressive
towards other WOMEN.
“Association” finally SUBSUMES us in the PROBEMATICAL. The
phenomenologist Gabriel Marcel explains this as an absence of Availability,
which is a-kin to Charity. The key distinction is that one separates subject
from object as though behind some much too sanitized Quarantine window. To
quote Watts: You are “putting Nature at the distance of so-called objectivity
as if she were an enemy to be shot.”
“Her direct look at the camera, her red lipstick, and long
hair also contribute to sexualization.”
Excellent. May be I will be the next Shakespeare like I all
ways wanted.
Dm.A.A.
Why Sexuality is not a
“Social Construct”.
Blame.
Disempowerment.
Conformism.
De-personalisation.
Fascism and
Hegemony.
Guilt as
Oppressive Technique.
Objectification.
Hypocrisy.
Marginalisation.
De-individualisation.
(Phal)loghocentrism.
Lack
of generosity.
Control.
Excuses.
Bad Faith.
Projection.
What
you Resist persists.
Confirmation Bias.
Moral dilemma.
Perversion.
Cognitive Consonance versus
Dissonance.
Epistemology.
Phenomenology.
Sexual
health as road to Actualisation. (You know you want to.)
